Suffering In Monosyllables
by Zagzagael
Summary: Okay, this is a kinda sorta AU from Daryl's perspective. And he's in a coma. Oh, so is Rick. Imagine the Premiere episode of Season 1 of The Walking Dead...if it had been totally different. Spoilers through S4.
1. Chapter 1

His existence had no value, he was a devalued soul.

All of his lifelong days he had been battered by other men. His father, Merle on a rage, a middle school teacher, scumbags at bars, the tire shop manager, and now this man of the law. But this time it wasn't a belt or fists, clever insults or pool cues and boots. This time it was a bullet. Leastways, it wasn't the riot shotgun he had watched take down his brother and the janky little drug dealer who had driven them into this mess. He'd seen that nightmare of exploding gore just before he crawled out of the broken camaro window and put his hands up. For all the good that did, must be something that only works on the tv. He listened to the endlessly echoing report of the high-powered rifle after he felt the bullet cut through him. Thinking to himself, that's the sound of my Valkyrie, that's the sound of my leaving.

He was hit, a more serious version of what he always seemed to be on the receiving end of. But the same. The same bone shattering intent, the same mindless desire to injure, to put the hurt on, to inflict, to bring down a notch or two. And it was pain, no question about that at all, but after a lifetime of taking hammer blows he was tempered where it mattered most. His mind.

He didn't even own a gun. Certainly didn't have a small blued piece shoved into the waistband of his sagging jeans the way the drug dealer did, didn't have the mind to pick it up off the ground the way Merle had done.

He could feel the ragged field grass beneath him, somehow his pant leg had ridden up as his body spun itself around the impact of being shot, and the half-chewed blades of pasture were rubbing his calf and both bare arms. All he could see was the clear heavens arching over his head. Not a cloud in the god-damned sky, he thought, and felt his brain twist a bit with the idea of God damning heaven.

Merle was dead. And he couldn't un-see what he saw. Couldn't close his eyes for the shock, but didn't want to anyway. The sky was as blue as a bruise. And the world was spinning widdershins beneath him. It was quite a ride.

He could hear shouting. Policecar sirens muffled but urgent. And far in the distance the mournful cry of an ambulance. _Say a prayer,_ his momma used to tell him whenever they heard the sound. _Say a prayer._

Finally. He closed his eyes and drifted.

* * *

The paramedic and his EMT moved quickly through the fallen, wading in the viscera of their injuries. Squatting, hunkering, bending. Hands reaching. Clocking Seiko Chronographs with fingerpads pressed into wrist veins.

"We need another car," Jim told T-Dog.

But he looked at him across the top of the flipped and ruined sweet vintage ride and shook his head, barely a perceptible movement. "What we need is the meat wagon," he grunted. Simple.

Jim pulled a face.

Recon done, they had returned to the side of the downed Sheriff, urging all his boys to back off him, let him breathe, let them work. Bring the gurney, hold this IV bag. The man's partner was steady as sharpened steel and T-Dog left Jim to it. He slung the strap of a medic bag over his shoulder and jogged over to the guy laid out flat on his back on the far side of the wreck. There was a deputy standing some distance away, anger radiating into the space between him and the wounded man. T-Dog moved around him, and knelt down in the grass. He didn't have to pick sides; he was always on the side of the suffering.

"You still here, buddy?" T-Dog asked him, using the blunt shears to cut a line up the man's sweat-soaked t-shirt and flipping the edges back so he could press a trauma-sorb to the bullet wound. It was ragged and gaping, on the left side of his chest. Both men had taken true intention heart shots and should be dead by rights but angels or demons had deflected the bullets. Still, experience told him that the cop was going to live, he wasn't sure about the robber.

He looked around in the grass for the gun, nothing. The man did have a wicked hunting knife sheathed on his belt but that was the only weapon he could see. Not his business, he told himself. Police probably already confiscated it, but he could see the handgun gripped tight as a lifeline in the dead big fellow's hand just a few feet away. Shotgun blast to the chest had taken care of that threat real quick.

The radio on his hip crackled and he told dispatch they needed the coroner and another ambulance if no one wanted to declare the two corpses DoA on-site, but they were going to transport the two medical victims together. Time was running out the same way his patient's artery was running his blood out and onto the ground.

In the back of the ambulance, he had the deputy on the gurney and the other man on the backboard. He was kneeling between them, working methodically and efficiently while Jim expertly tore back into town towards the hospital. He had loaded the outlaw feet first in order to be as close as possible to the wounds of both men, their left sides facing him. He was tag-teaming each injury, watching as they bled through the absorbent pax and groaning their way into a shared unconsciousness. Grievous bodily injury in stereo.

The Sheriff was thrashing and T-Dog reached down for his hand, holding it fast in his own. "Steady," he told him. But it was impossible to work and offer the human comfort of holding the man's hand. "Here," he mumbled to himself and pulled the other patient's hand over. The Sheriff grasped it hard and quieted.

The paramedic didn't notice when both of their hands slipped the half a foot to the floor, holding onto one another for dear life. Tied fast, descending into the same dark waters together.

* * *

Somehow he had survived the violence of medicine. But every single time he tried to pull himself up and out of the bloody waters he was drowning in and just breathe already, he would feel the strength ebb away from him; drain out the rounded heads of each of the long bones in his body. And under he went again.

"He's fighting his way back to consciousness," Doctor Greene told the ERT who was lingering in the doorway, ready to thump the patient's heart back to life with her strong hands, fingers interlocked on his sternum. "He's okay. He's going to be okay. Soon."

"That will make the policemen happy, they can have their eye for an eye," she answered, a slightly bitter tone to her words. He gave her a sober look and she nodded, contrite, her blonde braid swinging free of its pins. She reached over her head and fastened her hair back into place. "I'm gonna cut this, I swear."

"Don't Bethy, please don't. For your daddy's sake," the doctor told her, busy with notations on the patient's record.

"You don't like Maggie's haircut, do you, Daddy?" she teased him and he kept writing. Then he tucked the pen into the breast pocket of his shirt, smoothing the lapel of the lab coat back into place.

"I'm going next door now to see that Sheriff. Come and learn something, why don't you?" he walked past her but she stayed in the room for a long time looking at the man in the bed. She took a tentative step closer.

The ambulance had come screaming up to the loading dock doors just around noontime of the day before. T-Dog working without pause on the uniformed man on the gurney while she and another one of the lift crew ran outside to transfer the back-boarded patient to a medical dray of his own. The staff descended on both critical patients, but the Sheriff was the center ring in the three ring Emergency Room circus. She didn't hesitate to tend to the other gunshot victim, leaping aboard when one of the surgeons directed her to do so.

He was unaware of the intimacy they had shared, how she had to straddle his body, both of her knees pressed up hard against his sides, her elbows screaming tired from the relentless rhythm of the CPR as the ER staff stabilized him and prepped him for surgery. His blood a steady drip out of the ragged-edge bullet wound, spurting with each compression she made of his ribcage. She didn't know then that she would wake weeping for the rest of her life from dreams of his blood becoming a claret waterfall of carnage, drowning them all.

Unlike the panicked expression of the wounded Sheriff, his face had been free of strain. Not the usual grimace worn by a patient fighting for his life; she had kept her gaze fast on his features wondering if he was walking with angels. Or the dead.

"Stay with me," she had told him. "C'mon, stay here," she had urged. And nurses and doctors had grown used to the ways in which she talked to those who were leaving and they allowed her sing-song voice to call him back from wherever it was he was headed. Later, she haunted the hallway just outside the operating room, waiting for word. She had never done that before.

Now, she quickly brushed the long unkempt hair off his forehead, her fingers smooth and cool on his skin and she whispered something to him, then turned and joined her father in the room next door.

* * *

It was as if he had been sleeping off a long miserable head-pounding, ya did things ya ain't never gonna live down if I have my druthers lil' brother, drunk. He rose wobbly and parched and realized it might be more a cigarette hangover than booze. His head fucken hurt but it was his chest that was aching him as though he'd been mule kicked in the ribs. He ducked out of the tent and up on the ridge crest he saw the rest of the camp gathered for some kind of morning meeting. He could see Merle hanging just back from the group but with his head turned so that he was listening with his good ear, not his gun ear.

That suited him fine. He would rather hold himself at a distance from these people. At least for a while. It took him a long time to warm up to folks but when he did his loyalty went without question and that was a gift he wasn't ready to give. Just yet. Not until they knew more about what exactly had gone wrong with the world. He had to piss like a doused race horse and he stepped into the cool and welcoming cover of the copse of trees next to where they had pitched their own camp.

A few minutes later and Merle was banging around looking for something. He joined him.

"I'm goin' on a run with some of 'em," he told him. "Hit the train track edge of town, ya know."

"Tha' right?" he asked. It sounded very unlike something his brother would do.

"Damn straight. We need to represent to this group of uppity townies, I've been thinkin'. We need to be as much in the know as they are. 'Bout everything. All of it."

Daryl nodded. That, actually, made good sense.

"What do we need? If'n I see it."

"Arrows. Ammo. Smokes."

Merle chucked him playfully on the side of the head and nodded good bye. Daryl stood and watched the group load up.

He didn't know it would be over a year's time before he saw his brother again.

He hunkered down to tie his boot laces and noticed the toes of his Red Wing contractors were stained by splotches of what appeared to be drying blood. He had no recollection of how on earth living human blood would have splattered his boots. And certainly not recently enough to still be gobby wet. He traced the pattern with the tip of a finger but could not make sense of it. Thinking on it too long hurt his brain, not his mind, but the actual organ itself tucked inside his skull. He picked up his crossbow, patted the big Busse sheathed on his hip, and melted away into the shadow of the underbrush without a word to anyone.


	2. Chapter 2

Dr. Hershel Greene stood in the patient's room, head cocked, eyes narrowed, and watched Sheriff Rick Grimes quietly fighting for his life in the hospital bed. He reached up and flipped the TV set to off, understanding that it was on in an attempt to keep the man company, but it was a bothersome thing. All morning talk shows and self-importance and mind-numbing political discourse; a horrorshow of the whole wide world. Sometimes he thought that television might be the devil's work, a conduit for evil. He didn't have TV at his home, didn't abide by it or allow it.

With a slight out-blowing of his breath, he considered the bucolic safety of his farm, how he had worked so hard to protect its vintage charms and robust lifestyle amidst the slow-death systemic infection of modern civilization.

It was early rounds, so the Sheriff's hospital room and the hallway just outside the door wasn't filled to overflowing yet. The overwhelming tsunami of emotion of the evening before. The angry partner wasn't here and that was a relief to the actual energy inside the room. The woman was also conspicuously absent, he had seen her shielding the young boy, the son, and he assumed or at least hoped she was home making things as normal for that child as she could, knowing that her family was in crisis. He hoped she had the tenacity and perseverance to walk hand in hand with her husband as he wound his way through the valley of shadows. The man was going to benefit from that kind of shared burden.

Unlike the suffering body and soul next door who appeared to be as alone as a man can be. It was a shame how circumstances changed a life, redirected it, held it up, pulled the rug out from underneath.

And there but for the grace of God…

He had just come from Daryl Dixon's room and knew he might be the only one who recognized that these men were the same inside, underneath, down in the depths, in the marrowed bone. Where it mattered.

* * *

Officer Friendly was what Merle had nicknamed him but Daryl didn't know that, seeing as how Merle wasn't around. Not anymore. Handcuffed to a roof, thunderclouds forming angrily above his head. Frightened enough of the rising, ensuing storm to hacksaw his own hand free of its arm. He stood on the roof and took in the scene and as though whispers of a ghost spoke to him, he knew this new guy's name as sure as eggs is eggs was Officer Friendly.

He could talk trash with the best of them when he was riled enough to it. He turned and took a long, slow, meandering look out across the industrial section of Atlanta, across to the skyline, and beyond to the hills of Georgia. Not that he could see all that from where he was standing, but it was a vista as much a part of him as his own internal topography. It was bred into the bone.

Life had turned itself inside out the same way a coon dog gone to ferocious will turn a ring-tail inside out.

For the first time in decades, decades dammit, he felt the flicker of fear lick up every single vertebrae in his spinal column until it tongued into the base of his brain and washed his body with a fine sickening sheen of sweat. He did not want to be alone. Not with these monsters after him, please JC, not that. Under the bed, in a closet, clearing the fence in the backyard on the run, nothing was going to save him this time. He needed these people.

He squinted across the grey and gloomy expanse and caught the guarded but honest blue-eyed gaze of Officer Friendly. He caught it sure 'nuff as though it had been thrown at him.

He nodded, sucking his lips between his teeth. He needed that man and that man needed him. It was only a matter of time before the new world had them hunkered down beside one another, thigh pressed against thigh, flexing to leap into the fray together but first the big Busse cutting mirrored lines into their palms and their hands grasping fast to one another, bleeding into one another's wounds. Blood brothers.

* * *

The little girl had been missing four days and three nights before the local PD finally asked for help. Community members from towns within a drivable distance had convened on the edges of the downtown park, across the street from City Hall and the police station. The County Sheriff's office stood in charge of the search and rescue operation. Daryl distrusted the police on principle rather than experience but he had been following the story and wanted to offer his own homegrown skillset if he'd be allowed to do so. He wasn't about to join a group of Sunday School teachers and walk shoulder to shoulder through open pastures, though, like they was being organized to do. That wasn't where they were going to find her, discarded the same as rubbish in some highway-fronted cow field. But he did want to know what the grand plan was in the master scheme of the thing. He sidled up to the makeshift command central and cocked an ear, eyes narrowed as he oriented the location and gridwork on the maps pinned up on boards behind the milling, uniformed men.

He could see the USGS topographical green and brown map with the bold black x indicating where the father's body had been found, back of his head blown clean off by his own dark hand. Daryl stepped closer, head lowered, peering up from beneath his brows. He watched the two Sheriff's deputies who had found the man, recognized them from the news, bend their heads together conferring over a map spread out on a collapsible plastic banquet table. He took a deep breath, held it and walked up to the other side of the table, opposite them. Both men glanced up. The angry-looking one sneered slightly and looked back down after a few ratty seconds; the blue-eyed cop offered him a close-lipped, kinder acknowledgement.

"I can track," he told him, nodding slightly, matter of fact and quiet-like.

"So can the dogs," said the angry one, finger and gaze on the map.

"Yep. They ain't found her, though," Daryl replied, reckoning he would just go grab a cup of coffee and the blue-plate special at the diner across the street and head home.

The blue-eyed cop leaned towards him with just his head and one shoulder, steadying himself with a hand spread wide on the table top. "You know these woods?"

Daryl nodded. "Yes, sir. Since'n I was a boy, younger 'n her."

The partner turned on his booted heel and stepped away, all pretense of studying another number-gridded map with another group of the team.

Daryl kept his attention focused fast on the man in front of him. "I'm figurin' she hit Bear Bite Creek, stumbled around there for a time and has gone to ground. That'll throw the dogs. For a lil' while, least. They'll catch the scent again but could be too late by the time they do."

The man nodded. Behind him, his partner who was listening, with his face turned away - he had an unnerving habit of flicking the safety of his holstered handgun on off on off - shook his head, a firm, disgusted motion and rolled his shoulders back hard enough to touch the bones of his blades together, and Daryl knew in that moment that no one believed the little girl was going to be found alive.

But he did, he believed it and threw himself verbally forward and had no idea where this perseverance was coming from. His voice was pitching up an octave. "Can't get in there and track 'cause you people got it all cordoned off and I get that, but the trail's gonna be," he shrugged, "harder t'read, if you will, every hour that passes by. She's just a kid. She can't have gone that far."

The angry cop had come back, lingering at the other man's shoulder. "What makes you think someone didn't take her away from there? What else you think you know?"

He could feel the short hairs on the back of his neck bristle. His summer haircut fresh as the day. "Ain't no one else involved in this but that little girl and her daddy. She's either hurt bad or she's scared bad, same thing really." He looked away from the narrowing glance of both men, his skin transparent under their scrutiny. "What'ver."

The blue-eyed cop turned to another table and grabbed a nametag and sharpie in one fluid movement, turning back and bending over to write. "What's your name? See that transport? Get on it and head out there."

"Rick," warned his partner, voice low and menacing. Rick brushed him off with a quick head motion.

"Daryl," he told him and Rick scrawled it on the sticky paper DARRELL, handed it to him, and indicated he slap it onto his chest.

Daryl nodded, a grateful acknowledgement, and headed towards the open-bed deuce and a half.

"Hold up," Rick called, and then fell into step beside him. "I'll go with."

In the back of the truck, both men hunkered down, spines touching the sides of the bed, balancing on the balls of their feet as the vehicle grumbled, heading out of town and up into the overgrown woods. Daryl recognized the green uniforms of the two Fish & Game wardens, the light blue of two city policemen, good ole' boys, and then the Sheriff's brown and creams beside him. None of them would meet his eye. Pussies. His own Carhartts had a ragged hole in the left knee and the hems were torn out in the back, his Red Wing contractors creased and aged but kept supple with neatsfoot oil. A flannel that could use with a washing.

From the fleeting corners of his vision, he could see how Rick kept a hand on the tooled black holster, pressing it into his thigh, quieting the lethal man-made Python. He missed the comforting, dangerous weight of his Scout, laid across the backs of his shoulders as though a sun-dried and brainpan-emptied horse skull.

* * *

In the middle of the finely-combed campground the monster had built, now framed in flapping yellow tape, Daryl stood stock still breathing through the scene. The body was gone, but the blood remained, blackening the earth, human poison. And inside the tent, another pool of blood, this a crimson-stain, smaller and smeared around the gaping tear in the rip stop nylon floor.

Rick was standing beside him, holding the tent flap open, ushering in the light. Daryl stepped back and looked at him hard, stunned and betrayed by the police, the news, this sorry excuse for a father.

"He shot her," he said simply. "Shot his own little girl."

Rick nodded. "Someone shot her. Yes, that's what we think."

"Not someone. Her daddy. Then he turned the gun on himself," he walked away, "over here, like you found him. But he didn't know she was a fighter, that one. She got up, saw her daddy, and she-" The ground was churned up with bootprints and he kept walking, ducking under the tape, moving into the woods. "Here," he shouted back to Rick, "trail's right here." He bent down and traced the paw prints of the bloodhounds and the shuffling prints made by a heart-breaking child-sized pair of Keds.

"Let's go," Rick had a quick hand on his shoulder that he shrugged off, leading the way down towards the creek.

* * *

Carol stood, tentative and unsure, shoulders broken beneath the weight of her life, face blanched with the embarrassment of the undeniable facts of her personal horrorshow. Beth was on her way to stop in on the patient, smiling too sincerely at the Sheriff's Deputy standing surly guard outside the hospital room door. She paused when she saw the older women lingering in front of it, clutching the ragged bouquet of wild flowers and the second-hand vase.

"Can I help you locate a patient's room, m'am?" she asked her.

The woman flinched and Beth furrowed her brows.

"That's okay," the woman answered, vague.

"Are you here to see Mr. Dixon?" Beth guessed, trying to find a balance in her tone between a professional demeanor and sheer curiosity. She was wearing scrubs, trauma team green, and clogs, the sunlit hair messily pulled up to the crown of her head.

The woman looked up sharply, her expression a badly honed serrated knife's edge. She nodded, almost apologetically.

"Why, he's right in here then. C'mon," Beth lingered two fingers on the other woman's bicep before she pulled away and followed her past the guard and into the room. She stopped short and turned to her. "He's not awake, and he's not breathing on his own. He looks rough."

The woman nodded but still gasped and covered her mouth with her knuckles when she saw the figure in the bed. "Oh, Daryl Dixon," she sobbed out his name and Beth quickly tugged a Kleenex from the box on the bedside table and handed it to her while taking the flowers and setting them down.

"Are these Cherokee Roses?" she asked, fingering the snow white velvet petals.

The woman nodded; her hand hanging useless in the air above Daryl's arm.

"That's alright. You can touch him. Talk to him. Lotsa folks believe that comatose patients can hear you," Beth told her, walking around the foot of the bed to the other side, stepping up close, possessively against the edge, and lightly gripping his forearm.

"Good morning, Daryl. You missed a good breakfast and with hospital food that's not something to take lightly. We had fresh peaches from Patricia and Otis's farm, they brung 'em in all washed and juicy. I'll go over to their place and fetch you a couple, set 'em aside for when you decide you're hungry enough to wake up. Sweet Georgia peaches, ya know." She looked up and caught the starved eyes of the other woman. She smiled but it felt sad and strange. "Like that, see? Just talk to him like that."

Carol shook her head the smallest movement no.

Beth felt the pads of her fingers brushing against the riotous blonde hairs on the man's forearm, the masculine ropy muscle, the warm flesh.

"How do you know him," she asked kindly, interested.

"I don't. Not really. He found something that was lost to me. Taken from me. It meant a lot." She wiped her nose with the Kleenex and balled it into her fist. "That was a few years back now."

Beth nodded. "You can't be in here alone. I'm sorry." She rolled her eyes slightly at the open door. "You want to sit a while with him, here in this chair and I'll stand over there?"

"No," the woman said, her voice a whisper and her body listing towards the rocks, "that's alright. Thank you."

Beth watched as she turned away, walking out the door. The regretful life a thin, thin skin over the fragile wreck of her bones.


	3. Chapter 3

His momma had been a petite blue-eyed blonde farm girl with a shy tilt to her head but a cocky smile on her face. He knew this from the pictures he'd seen. He had memories of someone else's memories.

For the short time he knew her, when she was his momma, what he could remember of knowing her, she wasn't that girl in the photographs no more. Not really. Shy of getting hit, cocky with a drink or three in her. She liked dandelions, she told him so, and he brought her fistfuls. She liked the crusts of peanut butter sandwiches so he let her nibble his. She wanted to sing at the Grand Ole Opry so he sat quiet on the couch while she sang and he listened to her with his eyes wide open. Sometimes she needed to go somewhere late at night and he would settle down into the back seat of the car and curl himself into a ratty old blanket that smelled of rain must and watch hard for her, eyes just skimming over the top of the door, until she returned, the black night leaning into a grey morning.

Once he got big enough, she bought him a bike down at the Salvation Army. Taught him how to ride it, laughing for the three days it took him to learn how to balance his weight. He was older than most when she taught him and it didn't occur to him until decades later that it was because she knew a bicycle would be a freedom for him. Take him miles down the road away from her, have him packed up with neighborhood boys, spending the summer down at the vacant lot where they built dirt jumps and flew. Just left the earth. That last summer, he'd get up before her, chow down a bowl of boxed cereal, and be blocks away by the time she woke.

If he dreamed of her, and it wasn't often, it would be the morning of that day and she would be standing on the front stoop, wrapped in a soft blue robe, no slippers, hair piled up on her head, cup of coffee in her hand, waving goodbye to him as he pedaled away. That's not how it happened; he didn't even remember the morning of the day she died because it was so much like all the other sticky, humid mornings that summer.

He hadn't known that she was a light for him. Illuminating his small world. He became lost in the darkness of his life. Or he got lost, looking for her.

After the fire, she was gone. Just gone.

And he drew a heavy bold black line around his clockwork heart, two halves of the whole. Before the fire. After the fire. That year they were being taught in school about time and calendars and Before Christ and anno Domini. Latin was gibberish and for him. A.D. simply meant After Death and this translated into his own personal timeline as A.F. and he spent the better part of that year wondering about the afterlife for his momma. Where had she gone, exactly? He knew she wasn't coming back, knew better than to wish her back because she'd been burnt to ash and playground stories told him that the dead come back as though risen up from what had killed them and then he'd have his momma but she'd just be grey dusty flesh and charred bone and she wouldn't have a face and she wouldn't be able to sing anymore. Or kiss him sloppy goodnight, smelling of menthols and wine. Not anymore.

Not that the dead scared him. They didn't. Not then, he wasn't a baby. He wasn't scared of things like that. Not to say he was unafraid. He was plenty afraid. For all the good that did him. Which wasn't much at all. Fear made him aware of things, his ears honed for the difference in a tone of voice, his eyes sharpened for a muscle twitch small as in an eyelid.

Stumbling through the dark, being chased by a monster. There was no more light to run to.

She had been his emblazoned shield.

* * *

For a long time, he wanted Merle to paint him a picture with words. Carve her image out of descriptions and stories. Show him a photograph with her likeness printed on the paper. But he didn't see Merle much after the fire. A.F. Another thing to constrict his heart.

He remembered her as though she was in a story someone had told him years and years ago. About a sweet kind of innocence that was hope and light and softness. That's what he wanted was the softness, that's what she had taken with her when she went.

He wanted all the hard edges ground off, the sharp bits that cut, the impacts that bruised. He wanted delicate. He wanted to try to hold something breakable. Keep it from breaking.

Once he was grown, things got better. Once he was more or less away from his daddy. Not that he ever really got that far away. For all the scrubbing, he couldn't wash it clean. Blood disgraced his flanks, his knuckles, his lip, and the gums where his teeth were rocked loose. It was a port wine stain, a birthmark.

* * *

One night, drunkenly weeping for her without cause, he tried to reason out this descent into emotionalism with Merle. He was too young to be so shit-faced, didn't know how to drink. Not then.

"Ya think," he sniffed, lighting another smoke, they were sitting in the front room of a trailer Merle was watching for somebody, "maybe this is the anniversary of something?"

"Of something like what?" Merle was getting pissed off angry with his crying.

"I dunno. Her birthday, maybe," he paused didn't want to say it, didn't want to feel the shivering of his spine with the tempting of fate, "or of that day, ya know."

"Nope. What day? You know it ain't her birthday. The day our old man knocked her out and she woke up blind in one eye? That day? Or the day she forgot to pick you up from Kindergarten and you cried so much you threw up? Guess you thought that was it, you was gonna be all on your own. That day."

He wiped brutally at his face with his knuckles, fucken' Merle. "No."

"Jaysus, stuff a rag up that bleedin' hole, why dontcha?"

"Screw you."

"Screw me? Why are you even cryin' for her? She left you, little brother, she checked out, gave up, did the Dutch…." He trailed off, eyes narrowed, looking at the devastation he had wrought. "Daryl?" Merle had shifted his stance, the fight flayed off his skeleton by the knife's edge expression of his brother's horror and disbelief.

"The fuck you say?" Daryl's voice was barely audible over the screaming and shouting inside his own skull. He stood and staggered backwards, over the arm of the chair, falling like a body falls from a bridge, onto his back, the chair upended, the world crashing black.

* * *

Years later, he still had trouble with alcohol. Zero to fuck you in less than two drinks, fuck you to screaming in less than one more, and then screaming to fists flying or weeping. Like a girl. It's just how it was. Drinking made him thin, insubstantial, friable. Stripped the outside off of him, exposed the raw and trembling inside of him.

This night, he was at that in-between place, fingers tracing the black ligature that girdled his heart, the B.F. and A.F. line he'd drawn in his childhood but that still had his heart beating irregular in manhood.

"She didn't really? Did she?" he hadn't known the question had been hiding in his mouth, infecting all his molars.

"Not this, please gawdamighty, not this." Merle wasn't having it.

Daryl pushed harder. "She wasn't like that." But what he wanted to say was he knew enough about the weapons his father wound around his fists to know that this fact, this abandonment, would have been the most lethal. No one had ever opened him up with it. Until Merle.

"Like what, exactly? A quitter?"

He winced. "Someone needin' attention. Drawin' attention to themselves in that way."

"Is that what you think killing yerself is? Wantin' someone to pay attention to you?" Merle had the look of a treed coon, flabbergasted and confused.

He single shoulder shrugged.

"It ain't," his brother corrected him. "She wasn't some teenage girl snubbed by the prom queen or roofied by the quarterback."

"I know that. I fucken know that."

"Offin' yourself, for real, is makin' a choice about what life is. Your life. The choices you make or don't make. Optin' out. Takin' a bye." Merle threw his arm up in the air, his fingers spread wide, indicating everything. "We're all getting' dead, the trick is to not give into it. Ya follow?"

He didn't, but he didn't know how to say so without a fight.

"She gave up her life. Traded it for a bottle of hooch and a pack of menthols. You get that? Don't give up, lil' brother. You can't come back so don't go without kicking death square in the nuts with everythin' you got."

He wished she'd been a fighter, that she hadn't given up or given in, or made of her own existence a life not worth living or let someone else make it that way for her. He wished she could have somehow stayed and imbued him with a sense of hope for the world, for his future. He wished she would have changed her mind.

* * *

Jenner was a spectre, the black robed, hooded, towering figure holding fast to the scythe with its razored blade and the worn handles. He was going to mow them all down, maybe he already had and they were too stupid to know they were the walking dead.

Daryl felt the world become an ocean, waves rising and rising, they would all be lost, pulled under. Clawing their way back to the surface before the great black void sucked them beneath the furious foam.

He staggered away from the words, the intent, the calm capitulation. He couldn't look at the doomsday clock on the wall. Refused to allow someone else's stopwatch count down his own life.

He turned panicked eyes and Rick's gaze hit him, a blinding searchlight, and for one long drawn out moment, they found each other in the dark waters, reached out and held on. And within this grasp, the fear fell away, he kicked free of it, gulped in huge lungfuls of air, powered his heart with oxygen rich blood and refused to drown in the ocean of the scientist's abandonment of his life.

He became enraged.

That night, on the road, freezing cold from the inside out, small groups settled into cars, eyes staring into the vacant space they each had almost become part of, only the children could sleep. He finally tightened his pacing, his circling, until he was back on the edges of the group of them standing shivering silent together. He moved up behind Rick's shoulder, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, relishing the feel of his tepid blood circulating beneath his skin.

In this crazy fucked up time, he had found another man whose heart beat with the same velocity, a fist of muscle, pounding out the same punishing cadence, _alive alive alive._


	4. Chapter 4

It was the second morning after both men had suffered similar traumatic response to being shot. Hershel was at the furthest end of his skillset in the examination, monitoring, and care. He knew the statistics were not in favor of either man making a full recovery, or even recovering at all, from his anoxic ischaemic injury. And for some reason, that pricked him. He had slept barely a restless two hours the night before and every time he closed his eyes he saw the deputy and the redneck standing on the other side of a fence calling to him. His daughters were there, too, but not on his side of the cyclone and how unsettling was that vision. He had finally given up wrestling with his subconscious and pulled his body out of bed, like the dead groaning out of the grave, and went downstairs to play a hundred hands of Solitaire.

Now he was standing at the nurse's station waiting for the neurosurgeon to arrive from the next town over. To either confirm or argue his assessment. He sighed, rubbing his thumb and finger into his closed eyelids.

"Things aren't that bad?" the male nurse teased him from the other side of the counter.

"Glenn," he shook his head, "I can't imagine things being much worse."

"Really?"

The boy's face was so wide open, so guileless that he had to turn his own face away lest he crumple in front of the staff. "Not for me. For those two men behind me."

Glenn nodded and stepped closer, a patient's record in one hand and a pen in the other. "Yeah?"

Dr. Greene nodded. "Yes. We're waiting for Dr. Horvath to arrive from Queen of Heaven." He fished a pocket watch out of his front trouser pocket and checked the time. "Any minute now."

Glenn nodded and sat down in a vacated chair, tapping the pen in an irritating staccato on the closed file.

"Spit it out, Glenn," Hershel told him.

The nurse nodded then climbed back to his feet, leaning towards the doctor on his fisted hands. "After we moved the beds last night, you know, put them both in the same room, the Doctors Jenner were talking to one another. I was the only one left in there and well," he shrugged, an uncomfortable look skipping across his face.

"Well what, exactly?"

"They were laughing and saying that hospitals should be outfitted with a decontamination failsafe so that the MRSA could just be burnt out, patients be damned."

Hershel nodded. "The CDC has a strange sense of humor, son. That's all that was. Stress of the job."

The younger man scowled. "MRSA isn't funny and I thought it was inappropriate conversation in front of two comatose patients."

"I agree with you there. You say anything?"

"No."

At that moment, Dr. Dale Horvath came through the doors at the far end of the hallway, the professional demeanor belied by a grizzled white two-day growth of beard, and a sloppy polo shirt underneath his lab coat. Hershel turned to him with an outstretched hand.

Dr. Greene and Beth stood watching as the neurosurgeon meticulously examined the two patients. He had recruited Glenn to assist him as he moved methodically over each man's prone form, scanning the records, snapping film into the wall-mounted x-ray viewer, stepping back, tipping his head, narrowing his eyes in thought, and dictating to the nurse.

He relaxed for a moment, fingers ghosting the pulse in Sheriff Grimes' wrist. He turned to Hershel. "So, tell me again, you've got them both in the same room because of a MRSA outbreak on this floor?" His question was more conversational than inquisitive.

"The CDC arrived yesterday. It's a mess, as these things can be, you know," Hershel answered, watching the other physician's movements with intense focus.

Beth was beside him with two cups of coffee. She had tried to hand one to each surgeon, but both had refused. Dr. Horvath gently set Rick's hand back on the bed and held his hand out to the blonde. "I'll take a sip of that now. And thanks." He drew long on the coffee, then handed it back to her. He turned to his patient and with a quick flick of a penlight into one eye, then the other, Grimes began to groan. Dale smiled broadly at this response, then turned and elicited the same from the other patient. He tucked the penlight back into his pocket, patting it, and turned to his small audience. "That's good. That's great. Are they making much noise?"

Glenn and Beth nodded.

"Does Harrison Memorial have an intensivist?"

Hershel shook his head. "We don't. I'm one of the surgeons who dealt with them on arrival."

"Let's talk," Dale said.

"My office?" Hershel asked and just at that moment each person in the room could hear a man in the hallway. His voice, a low and dangerous weapon. Hershel led the group out of the room.

A dark-haired, uniformed Deputy was standing at the nurse's station, finger pointing nearly in an LVN's face, demanding to know where his partner was. "What do you mean, you moved him? No one said they were going to move him. Move him where? Where is he? And why is that yellow tape across the door of the room he was in yesterday?"

The nurse caught sight of Dr. Greene. "Here's the doctor, sir. He can explain the situation."

The man turned, eyes narrowed, lips pressed tight. Hershel held out his hand and the man softened a bit. "Deputy Walsh," he said shaking the physician's hand. "Where's Rick? Where's my partner?"

"Deputy Walsh," Dr. Greene said. "We've moved Rick into another room. The CDC is here and they requested that we isolate some of our new patients in an effort to contain a, um" he paused, "an antibiotic-resistant infection that we need to bring back under control. Your partner is here on this floor and his condition is the same as yesterday."

"You aren't going to tell me where he is?" Shane's voice had pitched low again. "Why can't I see him?"

"You can see him. Just as soon as his wife arrives and we inform her about the situation. Right now I'm about to sit down with this doctor who has driven over from Queen of Heaven to take a look at Rick and Daryl."

"Who? Rick and who?"

"The other man's name is Daryl."

"And he has the same doctor as Rick? He's getting the same treatment as the police?" He took a long step back, flat-palming his hair. "How's that work?"

"What exactly are you suggesting, Deputy?" Dale asked with a tipping forward of his head.

"I ain't suggesting anything. I'm just saying that it seems kind of off to me that a man of the law gets the same doctor as a man on the wrong side of the law."

"What would you have us do? Call in a veterinarian?" He shook his head in a kind of judgement of his own. "Should we act judge, jury and executioner on your say so? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Our job is to heal this man. Whom, I might add, is in very critical condition. The same condition as your partner."

"That outlaw is guilty." He leaned around the group and pointed into the open door of the room and with a quizzical look on his face, he looked at the edges of the feet of two beds. "Oh, hell no. Hell no! Are you telling me that Rick is in the room with him? That is not okay. That is not going to be okay."

"You need to calm down, son. This is a hospital, not a honkytonk and you will be asked to leave if you cannot lower your voice." Hershel raised a hand.

Behind him, Beth caught the eye of the policeman standing guard and motioned him over. He took a hesitant step before Shane turned on him. "Stand down. I don't need no babysitter. I'm going downstairs right now. I'm calling Rick's wife."

Hershel nodded with a firm, deliberate movement of his head and the group watched as Deputy Walsh strode with renewed purpose down the hallway, the air shocks on the double doors hindering his attempt to slam them open as he walked through.

* * *

He wasn't cold. Not like when he was a kid and sleeping on a bare mattress, wrapped in a filthy sheet and dressed in his clothing, wearing a hand-me down winter coat. He was still sleeping in his clothes, even his boots, but the bone-jarring shivering was something he'd either grown out of or grown his skin thick enough now to keep his blood warm. Or maybe he just wasn't scared anymore.

They were all becoming lean, hungry and taut. Walking endlessly, shoulders strung like wire pulled tight and vibrating with a constant twanging hum. Of readiness.

The bow had become an extension of his arm and a touchstone. He noticed the same with the way he'd catch Rick rubbing the ball of his thumb across the butt of the Python or tracing the length of the holster always belted around his hips. He had grown very aware of the other man's hands. He had stripped him in his mind down to the efficient shape of a killing machine, all hands and long muscles, tendons and ligaments, the swing of his body in space, the delivery of the deathblow, the habit he had of tipping his head as though tipping his hat in respect, the peripheral flicking of his eyes, the tight-lipped reassurance. Stripped of the old world skin, but not reduced without it, elevated to warrior.

He wished they were all armed to the teeth, but instilling the idea of one's body being a defensible space was a paradigm shift as slow moving as tectonic plates for this group. Even Lori, whose body currently didn't belong wholly to her seemed impossible to learn up. He'd watched Rick try and teach her awareness, sixth sense, letting the mind trust the body's response. The lesson always ended in a flippant response that left Daryl bewildered in his eavesdropping. Their boy was eager to learn but no one wanted to risk the wrath of his mother by placing him in any sort of teachable danger. He himself, had managed to step around Hershel and his eldest and put a long-handled axe in the hands of his youngest.

They had taken to a life on the run. On the lam, Merle would have said. Fugitives. They were all outlaws now, death dealers, just one step ahead of the inevitable. Casing houses, ransacking stores, hotwiring cars, syphoning gasoline, taking a new pair of boots off the feet of the living dead, killed for good this time.

They were killing for the sake of the good.

* * *

Lori and Shane and Chief Deputy Morgan Jones were standing, backs against the wall, a lineup of probable suspects, in the cramped hospital room as Rick was being readied for an MRI.

"Keep me posted. To the minute," Morgan told Shane. With sad eyes, he dropped a fast clasp on Lori's shoulder. "How's your boy?"

She sniffed and nodded and shook her head and fished a Kleenex out of her pocket and smiled.

"Sir?" Shane interrupted this display. "How do you feel about," he motioned with a vague hand over to the window end of the room where Daryl lay, "this arrangement?"

"I'm not following you, Deputy."

"It don't set right with me to have him in the same room."

"Why is that?"

Lori walked away, down to the window and cast a long, narrowed gaze across Daryl's still form, tightly wrapped in a thin hospital sheet. She blew her nose and looked out the window, across the small grassy rise. Behind her, the men still talked in angry hushed tones.

"It isn't for me to say, but I've gone over and over the reports and I don't think this man is going to be found accountable for shooting anyone."

Shane's face closed in rage. "So you say."

"Yes, Deputy. So I say." He softened, "Now I've got to get back to work. I'll see you at the station later this morning." It was a statement not a question.

Shane nodded, eyes closed.

"That's right. No rest for the wicked," Morgan announced and left.

Two orderlies and the male nurse appeared and push-pulled Rick's bed out of the wide door, he groaned in protest and Lori's head whipped around quickly. Shane shook his head at her, his eyes heavy with a silent request. The clanking sound of metal wheels, and Rick's guttural protests blended into the quiet humming of the machines in the room, the whooshing of the air conditioner, and the clipped tones of someone talking out in the hallway. Shane took the long strides down to where Lori was standing, hands clasped in front of her body.

"We need to talk," she whispered and he put his hand on the side of her neck and she leaned her head into his palm.

"Talk."

She indicated Daryl with wide open eyes and Shane grimaced in response. "He's nothing, nobody."

"There's no easy way to say this," she began. "I'm pregnant."

Shane's demeanor altered, changed, shifted. He became a swaying King Cobra, the hapless mouse in his sights. Long fraught moments filled the space between them.

Finally Lori closed her eyes, breaking the dark spell. "Shane. Do you understand what I'm saying? What I'm telling you?"

"I thought you told me you two been sleeping alone the past few months."

She gasped and covered her mouth with the crumpled Kleenex in her fist.

"Wait. What?"

She shook her head and wiped violently at her face, swiping dryness beneath her eyes, soaking up her tears.

"This is my baby?" Shane asked, too loudly, too rushed, too hopeful.


	5. Chapter 5

He woke up in the darkest part of the night to the sound of shouting. Two men and two women. Their angry voices had welded to his dreams and it took long, breathless moments for him to break the images apart and clear his head. He lay, curled on his side, on the sprung twin mattress in the small bedroom and listened hard. Merle, his on-again-off-again pregnant girlfriend Andrea, Andrea's crazy friend Michonne and a male voice he didn't recognize. It all sounded dark and dangerous and drunken.

He had to piss and was tempted to open the window and direct a hot stream of urine outside, lay back down, and return to a comatose sleep. Instead, he stood, unsteady, stoned on dreams, wearing his jeans and a ratty tee. He shouldered open the door and stepped into the dimly lit hallway. He could hear that the situation was happening outside. In the tiny bathroom, he took a leak, and did his pants back up, avoiding his reflection in the small mirror over the washstand, and fastened his buckle. He walked slow-like down the hallway towards the front room.

The front door was wide open to the hot summer night and sure enough there were four people standing on the lawn yelling their heads off. He could see that Merle had a long-handled socket wrench in the sagging back pocket of his steel-grey Carharts.

He fished a pack of Andrea's brand out of the detritus on the coffee table and tapped out a cigarette. He had a zippo in his front pocket. With a boldness bred from total apathy, he returned to the open door and leaned lazy against the aluminum door frame and smoked and watched the show.

Andrea seemed to be the subject of all the hollering or, more to the abstract point, the child she was carrying. Right now she was all gravid form, thin jutting bones and bellyful of baby, standing foolish referee between Merle and the other guy. Who, and Daryl leaned forward at the waist to make sure he was seeing this right, was wearing an eye patch. A landlocked white trash pirate. Daryl blinked and relaxed back against the door, tracing the first step down and out of the trailer with the long, bare toes of one foot.

Was it Merle's unborn baby or the spawn of Captain Morgan? That was the question du jour. Fatherhood. Daryl pursed his lips, cigarette between his thumb and finger and considered this latest twist in the reality show of Merle's soap opera life. But it was his life, too, wasn't it. And that was every kind of messed up this side of Sunday. He flicked the butt out into the night, leaving a sparking trail. No one seemed to notice but Michonne, who turned her beautiful face towards him and he watched her eyes narrow. She was all cool slow jazz, measured motion moving like smoke. He sucked his lips between his teeth, shrugged at her, and walked back down the hallway to his bedroom.

He didn't bother undressing. Sunrise was a few spare hours away and he could feel the gnaw in his belly for breakfast. He lay on his stomach, arms and legs spread wide and entertained a quick thought about the ebony queen trapped beneath him, but it felt too dirty with the woman herself standing just outside the far wall, so he tamped that down and pulled the pillow over his head, lacing his fingers and pressing his face into the musty smelling sheet. Instead he thought about a baby, blood of his blood, bone of his bone.

He had no idea how much time had passed before the screaming and shouting roused him from a sleep like death. Again. This was serious and he recognized the shift in tone, jumping to his feet and thundering down the hallway, leaping out of the door and onto the narrow walkway. Merle was down on all fours, both hands on the cement in front of him. The other man was straddling him, one long arm under and around his throat, the other hand bashing every single bone in Merle's hand with the wrench. Merle was bucking and screaming. Daryl felt paralyzed by the scene. The man's arm was a machine, a piston delivering pain.

Up against the car was Michonne, both her arms around Andrea, holding her back, away from and out of the insanity.

Before he could blink himself into enough awareness to act, the man swung a leg over and off his brother's back, delivered a swift kick in the ribs, and Merle went all the way down, cradling his hand between his thighs, swearing total annihilation at the top of his lungs.

"Stay down," the man said as though speaking to a dog. His voice a low whipcrack in between the male threats and female cries. He hardly seemed winded.

Daryl had to choose to help Merle or go after the other man. He rushed over, falling to his knees, hands on his brother's shoulders. He looked up as the man shoved the two women off his car, they both stumbled forward, falling onto the ragged lawn. With a fluid motion, the man climbed into his car, backed out in a spray of gravel and was gone. As though he, himself, had never even been there, but leaving a wake of destruction behind him.

Daryl patted uselessly at Merle's arm, the side of his head. He looked across to where the women were now sitting on their asses, eyes wide and stunned. He could not for the life of him figure how a single solitary man had brought each one of them to their knees. Reduced them to pain, tears, and humiliation.

He stood on shaking legs, narrowed eyes staring off in the direction the car had sped. He sniffed, shoving the knuckles of his hand up hard under his nose, smashing his upper lip against his teeth. He should never have gone back to bed. He should have been able to sense the simmering danger.

"C'mon, man," he said. "C'mon, Merle. We gotta get you to a hospital."

The woman were standing now. Michonne pulling at Andrea's elbow. "You okay?" she asked her quietly. "Baby okay?"

Andrea nodded, wiping ferociously beneath her eyes. "Merle? Baby?"

A ragged groan ripped its way out of Merle's mouth.

"You stupid bitch," Daryl turned on her, all deadly fury and disgust now. "Didja bring that guy here? Who the hell was that?"

Merle was trying to climb to his feet. Daryl leaned down and he slung his good arm around his shoulders and with his own arm around his waist, he pulled him upright. "Let's go."

They stumbled together over to Daryl's truck. "Get some fucken ice already!" he yelled at the two women. Neither moved. He shut the door, ran inside for his keys and wallet, a dishtowel that he broke the ice tray into, then back outside, slamming the door of the trailer shut. His expression thunderous.

Beside the Chevy he thought of saying something final, some deadly judgment that would implicate and sentence Andrea, but he could hear Merle calling his name, the broken plea of it, and instead he spat on the ground, yanked the door open and threw his body inside.

* * *

He hadn't thought that there were more nightmares in the turned world to be endured, suffered through, thrashing to wake from. And yet.

Even Hershel's terrible death did not destroy him the way that Rick being beaten down did. He had never felt so helpless in all of his life. Except for the times that he did. Before. The young boy quaking in fear until finally the monster of a father he had sniffed him out, reached into whatever hiding spot he'd found, hauled him forth with a meaty hand on his thin upper arm, swung him to the floor, and proceeded to beat the life out of him. He knew his father did not want him dead and gone. He wanted him to be the living dead. The zombie that could take the abuse, the sin eater devouring all his father's transgressions.

Afterwards, the fear would be drained out of him as though blood emptying his veins clear. All that was left was the useless shell of his skin, thinly holding his bones together, opened beneath the drunken wrath as though testament to his weakness, his failings. Leaving marks that bore witness to his purpose.

This was how his mind was opened and bled dry and left scarred in the new world, the world in which they had carved a modicum of safety from. He had wanted to believe in the idea of protection. Watching The Governor discipline their leader, his brother in spirit, opened all the closet doors, unloosed all the creatures from beneath the bed, invited in all the monstrous fathers. He cringed watching Rick be put down, told to stay down in the language of pain. Daryl raged on the other side of the cyclone. He lay waste to his own ego with the blade of useless useless useless slicing through, cutting him loose, sending him adrift into the inescapable horror of this life. He could not look away. He wanted to bear the brunt, knew he could take it in ways that Rick could not, would not survive.

And for a fleeting moment, he wanted to be consumed by death.


	6. Chapter 6

"It just don't seem right," she told her daddy.

Dr. Hershel Greene looked at his youngest child, studying her through a demeanor of a calmness that was learned rather than felt. Three times her age, decades of life and experiences had settled into his bones as though a cancer. Wisdom had escaped him and more often than not he felt ruled by emotion rather than thought. His personal God confounded him. His vision of being a wizened elder was an elusive filmy thing existing on the peripheral of the way he saw himself. He wanted to believe there was a design, a path, a purpose. He had wanted to believe, in his youth, that he would climb the mountain of age and crest the peak and see the world from a new vantage point. One from which the pattern would finally make sense, and there would be no more fear, no more panic. All would make sense and in the thin air of the long life lived he would be able to sit and ruminate. So far he was still halfway up the same dungheap all of them were staggering, stepping over the fallen, leaning down to offer a hand to the exhausted, and looking up ahead to where souls just disappeared into the ether, and their bodies dropped discarded.

He sighed. And put a hand on her shoulder and simply nodded his agreement.

Sheriff Grimes' family had decided to remove life support.

* * *

Beth knew pain, horror, grief more intimately than she knew joy, passion, completion. Both in her job but also in her personal life. The passing of her mother was a mortal wound, a nick in an artery that was irrevocably seeping her dry. She wanted to believe that her life was a horizon stretching to the far reaches of the bluest sky, fields of sunflowers bright and turning their faces to the light, meadows of tall grasses, creeks of the clearest coolest water. But when she paused in her day to day movement all she seemed to see was an endless ocean of ash beneath a darkened heaven. On her very worst days, she bee-lined her way through hospital corridors and up to the third floor where she settled herself in the nursery and gently rocked frantic newborns back into a state of obliviousness, held them until they were sleep drunk and passed out in her arms, the slightness of their presence a coin dropped into the deep well of herself, the wish that sounded in her depths.

As much as she could dismiss her own existence, she fought fiercely for the lives of strangers. It was a dichotomy she did not recognize.

She wanted Daryl Dixon and Rick Grimes to live. She wanted both men to groan themselves awake, open their eyes to a dimmed room, see a face that welcomed them back to the living, feel the warmth of a hand pulling them out of the in-between place and towards the light of the world. She knew that people could be revived, brought back from the dead. It just required a mysterious combination of medical intervention and a collusion of angels and demons warring over the spark carried at the very center of each human being. It was her job to insure that the fire burned, without being doused or flamed.

Now Sheriff Grimes' wife had decided to extinguish the life force of her husband. And Beth felt her body fill with prayer, wanted to lay her hands on the man, bid him farewell, wish him godspeed. She slipped into the room before the terrible events of the morning were to begin and she did just that. His skin was clammy now, his body still, his voice silent. After a long moment, she turned to the other body laid out, pulled up a chair, and took his hand in between both of hers. She laced her fingers through his fingers and squeezed.

* * *

Within the hour, her father found her there. Staring sightlessly over Daryl's quiet form out the window and into the new day breaking.

"Beth," he said.

She nodded, lifted one hand and wiped at her eyes with her knuckles. "I'm okay. His people will do right by him." She indicated Rick with a backwards tilt of her head. "But what about Mr. Dixon?"

"The State will decide."

She stood and shook her hand free, uncurling his fingers open and pressing them gently into the blanket. She pulled the chair around to the far side of the bed. "I'm going to stay with him. While, you know…"

"That is not a good idea. And I don't think you would be allowed besides."

"It is a good idea. He shouldn't have to be alone here when this is happening."

He pursed his lips. He knew better than to argue with her. There would be others who could try if they chose. He admired her dedication to the life force and he would have been destroyed if he knew how the death of his wife pursued her, chasing her away from her own sense of purpose. How the ghost of her mother had taken the shape of the living dead, intent on devouring her own daughter's life.

Beth sat back down in the chair, scooting it as close to the bed as her knees would allow. People were gathering in the hallway. She could hear the murmur of voices, the muffled sound of inevitability. She took up Daryl's hand and brought it to her forehead, lowering her face close to the heat of his body, closing her eyes, and whispering to him reassuring words of hope, light, and the goodness of people.

Lori and Shane entered the room together, shoulders broken and bowed. Their faces were stricken but their strides purposeful. Soon Rick's bed was a boat in a sea of people. He was being cut loose, set adrift. He was leaving.

Beth stood slowly, bending her body over Daryl, bringing her face close to his, her lips brushing his cheek. With the gentlest of motions, she brought her free hand up to the side of his head and gently turned his face towards her, away from the dying. She had his hand trapped between their chests, pressing his fist against the place where her heart was no longer calm. Her mouth was beside his ear and she began to tell him a story that began with, "You are not alone."

* * *

"Daryl. Daryl."

Someone was saying his name, a hushed curse, a promised blessing. He could not open his eyes. For a long heart-like-a-hammer moment he thought it was his name in Beth's mouth. His lungs were hurting him. His head an agony of white pain.

A hand on his shoulder, squeezing with a firm grip. His name again, but this time the voice filtered through the pain in his skull, shredded some kind of dream he had been having, reached down into his brain and woke him up.

Slowly he slitted his eyes. His right eye was a brutality to squint out of, swelled slightly closed and throbbing. Just behind the temple on that side, he could feel that the bones of his head had been injured. He closed his eyes, seeking out a memory, recognition of time, space, and his place in it.

He could feel a hard floor beneath him, a hard wall behind him. He squinted his eyes open again and with his innate knowledge recognized the light as dawn. The silhouette of the figure in front of him solidified. He sighed, relieved and overcome with an intense feeling of gratitude. He reached up with both hands for the hand on his shoulder and took it between his palms, pulling it down to the center of his chest and holding it fast against him.

"Rick?" he asked.

"Yeah, brother, it's me." The man hunkered down in front of him, went to his knees, brushed up hard against his own knees. "I think you might have a concussion, Daryl."

He nodded. That sounded just about right. Suddenly his mind was filled with rock solid memories. The beat-down Joe's men had put on him, Rick's insane and frightening fury cold as the grave. The reunion, slouching towards the unknown. And now this.

Trapped in a boxcar.

It was the end of the world but he was not alone.

Rick shook his hand loose moving both his hands up to the sides of his head, gentle pressure from his fingers, thumbs ghosting his cheekbones. The warmth and strength of the other man's proximity settled him, slowed his heart beat back to a thumping steady life-affirming rhythm.

"I've had worse. 'Sides, we ain't got time for me to be hurt," he whispered in his gravel-gruff voice.

"Right?" Rick asked, dropping both his hands onto his shoulders. "Well, time is relative. Or so they say."

Daryl felt his spine arch in appreciation of the reality of being grounded by touch, felt his living flesh call to the living flesh of another human being. He wanted to embrace and be embraced. He wanted to feel undeniably alive. "Who says that?" he asked.


End file.
